Chris Gallant dressed for an afternoon of shooting at a Long Island gun range in a tight Adidas T-shirt and purplish jeans.
In his right hand, he held a Sig Sauer case containing two of his own handguns. A third was tucked into his jeans.
It was a Tuesday a little more than a month from Election Day, when Gallant, a 37-year-old Black Hawk helicopter pilot, will face Nick LaLota, the Republican incumbent who is vying for a third term representing New York’s First Congressional District, which stretches from Huntington past the Hamptons to the tip of Long Island.
Gallant, who was taking a break from canvassing and phone banking, headed down a flight of stairs, handed the attendant his firearm license and ordered up his rounds.
“It’s just practice,” he said, with the rehearsed modesty of a fledgling politician. “Trying to get good at something.”
Gallant then proceeded to fire dozens of shots at or close to the bull’s-eye at the end of his lane.
“Pretty good, right?” he said.
Beyond practice, of course, Gallant allowed that shooting is also a way to relieve stress, which has been in ample supply recently.
Last month, The New York Post revealed that Gallant had appeared in varying degrees of undress in promotional photos for Mr. S Leather, a San Francisco fetish brand.
The images were taken for the company’s website in early 2010 when Gallant wasn’t yet 21. One shows him in a cage, wearing a harness and a muzzle, with another man behind him performing a sex act on him.
A second image had him above the same man, again in leather, this time receiving oral sex.
At Gallant’s request, the people at Mr. S deleted the shots sometime before he announced his candidacy for Congress in August 2025. But thanks to publicly available web archives, finding them was perhaps inevitable. (Despite calling it part of a political hit job, he said he has “no idea” who was responsible for alerting The Post.)
The Post presented the story with typical tabloid panache, with a headline that read, “NY Dem House candidate modeled for XXX-rated BDSM ads while serving in National Guard.”
A photo of a much younger Gallant in a harness at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco also became the subject of a Suffolk County Conservative Committee Facebook post that said “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington D.C.?”
The LaLota campaign did not directly address the images. And Gallant seemed to decide that the photos were a chance to show that a person in public life can contain multitudes.
Specifically, Chris Gallant can be a Long Island-raised Black Hawk pilot in the Army National Guard who flew choppers during one of his two tours in Kuwait, worked for five years as an air traffic controller at John F. Kennedy International Airport, serves as a volunteer firefighter and is an unabashed gun owner as well as a union man who posed for those photos almost 17 years ago, not because he was manipulated but because he was into it.
“I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky” as hell, he said, using a saltier word. “I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.”
It was his first in-depth interview since the images were widely shared. He wanted to make clear that he — like his outfits in those pics — had little to hide.
We were seated on a red leather sofa in the living room of his cozy clapboard house in Amity Harbor, which happens to be just outside the limits of the district he hopes to represent. (LaLota lives in Amityville, also outside the district, he pointed out.) Recent issues of The Advocate and Army Aviation Magazine were stacked on the coffee table.
In front of the house was a small yard and a white picket fence.
“I just thought, ‘If my family can accept me, the world can,’ and that’s how I lived my entire life,” said Gallant, who was wearing jeans and a fitted gray Rag & Bone sweater.
His mother, Barbara Solony-Cohen, was in the kitchen, having driven up from her home in North Carolina, along with his friend Jason Hewitt, a TD Bank branch manager, whom he met at a gay ski week in 2014. They were scheduled to go canvassing later that evening. Absent was his fiancé, Mike Ingram, a National Guard infantryman who Gallant said is stationed in the Middle East.
Gallant he said he hadn’t anticipated that this long-ago campaign for a fetish-wear brand would become public as it did. “I mean, you had to go hunt for this,” he said.
After The Post published its article, his team had conversations about the viability of his candidacy. But there are limited options available seven weeks out from an election.
So Gallant, who has the air of many a good-looking guy who has seldom if ever been told there’s anything he can’t do, started to see about working the situation to his advantage.
Maybe it could be his “Kim Kardashian moment,” he said, only half jokingly.
Less than 48 hours after the Post story, he uploaded a video of himself to Facebook, speaking into the camera and calling the photo release a “coordinated political hit meant to drive me out of this race.”
Then, his social media team posted a new ad of him in a tight black T-shirt that showed off his Marvel-worthy biceps. The slogan running across it read, “Make Politics Sexy Again.”
Sexiness, the ad went on to say, includes his plans for improving the lives of the voters in his district, including support for veterans and lowering the cost of living on Long Island.
If Gallant somehow prevails, several Democratic consultants said, it will most likely be in a squeaker.
Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, said New York’s First Congressional District had not been won by a Democrat since 2012. “But in a wave election, it’s definitely in play.”
One option for Gallant? Lean further into his image as a fit guy enjoying his sexuality, Reinish argued. “The Democrats have been librarians for too long.”
In the interview at his home, Gallant seemed to be contemplating just that kind of playbook. At least, he was not wringing his hands over photos from 2010.
“My most difficult thing was always getting my name out there or trying to improve that,” he said. “And there’s definitely been a name-recognition increase on the world stage.” He noted that “The Daily Show” had covered his modeling: The first joke told was that Gallant was getting his butt beaten, “but not in the polls.”
Gallant knows that the punchline is a little generous; it is an uphill climb in a district that has been represented by a Republican since 2015. His newfound attention might not help him “in the district” with the voters who matter.
And there remains the question of whether the photographs for Mr. S will be the biggest bomb to drop.
Messenger Papers, a conservative news site, published a piece about Gallant that insinuated that he had worked as an escort as recently as 2024 under the name Joe Flint, and that Flint was discussed on a site where patrons of escorts go to compare notes.
Gallant denies any such thing happened. He said that there may have been stolen pictures of floating around online, and that perhaps, they could have wound up on escort sites.
Emails to the men who had discussed hiring Flint on the site went unanswered.
But at a recent town hall, held at a sports bar in Middle Island, more than a hundred people showed up, and no one seemed interested in his sex life.
“Whatever, everyone has a social media history,” said Renee McKeon, 50, an independent voter who works as an administrator at the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office and who said she planned on voting for Gallant, despite having cast a ballot for President Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. “During Trump’s first presidency, there were guardrails,” she said. “The corruption is much more rampant now.”
For more than an hour, Gallant was hazy about policy, but he was perfectly capable of running through his opposition to everything he believes President Trump has helped bring about, from the war in Iran to the fast-tracking of ICE agents.
During a question-and-answer session, one person asked Gallant about a recent comment made by LaLota, in which his opponent called him “weak and woke.”
“I’ve carried people out of burning buildings; I’ve flown helicopters in the Middle East,” Gallant said. “If that’s weak and woke — well, I just think that’s inaccurate.”
Another asked him what should be done regarding misinformation online.
As a supporter of free speech, Gallant said he wasn’t sure exactly.
Still, he had some advice. “Don’t get your news from social media. Unless you’re going to look at mine.”
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